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Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...

https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick

So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.

4 months agoby SXX

Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this.

I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.

4 months agoby x187463

The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.

4 months agoby jerf

I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.

This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.

4 months agoby zero_k

I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”.

I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.

4 months agoby jrmg

Disposable vapes are an abomination that somehow society has normalised.

4 months agoby nusl

Long live hacking! This is what Hacker News is all about. Great article and fun project!

4 months agoby droobles

The current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.

4 months agoby NoSalt

Could one say that the author found the ultimate computing platform for running vaporware?

4 months agoby isoprophlex

We need to reduce microplastics.

Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.

I don't know if I'm sad or happy.

4 months agoby RedShift1

I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.

4 months agoby 1970-01-01

I am SHOCKED everytime I am reminded those Disposable Vapes exist.

My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?

Insane.

At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?

4 months agoby dev0p

This reminds me of when I was a kid, taking apart toys just to keep the tiny motors and circuit boards like treasures. Now as an adult, seeing someone pull a full working system out of a disposable vape to run a website feels like the same kind of magic. Maybe this is what romance looks like in the tech world.

4 months agoby Daisywh

This was my first time working with perl and I have to say, it’s quite well suited to this kind of task.

Nice to see Perl get positive press. Fun project, Bogdan!

https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/u...

4 months agoby gbacon

I’m not vaping mom, It’s my webserver.

4 months agoby daft_pink

By law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices?

Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.

4 months agoby distances

Meta comment: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a HN thread with this ratio of upvotes to comments (8 vs. 251)

Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!

4 months agoby jumploops

Getting a 503 error now upon request to the vape hosted blog. Safe to say that it got smoked by the hacker news traffic volume!

4 months agoby duncangh

So the EEs are right. Electrical circuits run on magic smoke.

4 months agoby analog31

So a question maybe someone can clue me in on here: while the specs on that MCU seem imminently reasonable to me (especially compared to some of the PIC12F and similar I've used in the past) the thing that feels odd is the high clock speed ARM core. Is it really that cheap and easy to drop an M0 core or ip block into an MCU? Why not more RAM and a simpler/slower core? The M0 feels grossly overkill.

4 months agoby rpcope1

I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.

Yet?

4 months agoby peteforde

I used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.

4 months agoby curvaturearth

"pacifiers for adults" is probably the best description for a vape that I have ever read.

4 months agoby bvvgpc

I never thought I'd see someone turn a vape into a web server. Totally absurd but also kind of brilliant. I probably won’t remember the technical details, but that ‘why not just try it’ attitude is seriously contagious.

4 months agoby ChaoPrayaWave

so I had to throw nginx in front of it so my little router wouldn't explode, but I hope some people will get to experience the relaxing loading experience live.

4 months agoby BogdanTheGeek

Took a few attempts (over a few hours) to get the vape hosted version to load... but it just worked and I felt soooo happy!

I wonder if you could use one vape as a load balancer, then have a few of them serving the content?

4 months agoby Lprince

I wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things.

It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.

4 months agoby ivape

This is why I come to HackerNews. This made my day.

4 months agoby zeppelin101

Want to fit a web server into a speck of dust? Check out smews ( https://github.com/2xs/smews ) it runs with just 8k of flash and 512 bytes of RAM, supports HTTP 1.1 over TCP/IP, SLIP or others, with both static and dynamic content (GET and POST) The code is 18 years old and hasn’t moved in 10, A sandbox for budding pentesters ;)

4 months agoby PrinST

This is really impressive. I laughed when I got 503 Unavailable on the hosted URL. I guess we're all hugging that little vape CPU a little too hard. :)

4 months agoby accrual

That's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan!

I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

4 months agoby shadowgovt

You think a Cortex-M0+ in a disposable vape is wasteful, wait until you see the ones with colour touchscreens and Bluetooth radios. It's probably only a matter of time before they start running Android on them.

4 months agoby jsheard

This is cool, but, man, I felt like such a pathetic excuse for a human being when, brutally craving nicotine, with my vape empty of the fruit-flavoured juice that I am literally addicted to like the stupid pathetic baby that I am, and stuck with the cravings because all the shops are closed until morning, and so, in need of a distraction, I opened Hacker News. FFS.

Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.

4 months agoby gabriel666smith

Missed opportunity to put a 503:Vape Unavailable http error.

4 months agoby tgtweak

> This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP.

Anyone have any experience with SLIP for macOS? Curious if the author was actually able to make that work, I’ve been looking into something similar the past few weeks with no luck.

4 months agoby SandmanDP

living that cloud life

4 months agoby konfusinomicon

True vaperware

4 months agoby oltmang

We are truly living in the precursor to some cyberpunk fever dream with this. Give it a few years and we’ll be smokin’ grandma & grandpa’s uploads out of vapes.

4 months agoby ineedasername

I respect the point about not wanting to send the manufacturer any business, but I would love to know the brand so I'd know which ones to rescue if given the chance.

4 months agoby Dilettante_

very impressive, I wonder if it would run Collapse OS (https://collapseos.org/)

4 months agoby broabprobe

Nice. But ...